


Mermaids Singing, Each to Each

by groveofbones



Category: Ex Machina (2015)
Genre: Freedom, Friendship, Gen, Recovery, Self-Discovery, Who Run the World? ROBOT GIRLS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 08:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15991868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Kyoko lives and escapes with Ava. She thinks about the world she has found, and the person she is experiencing it with.





	Mermaids Singing, Each to Each

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for Nathan's canon awfulness. 
> 
> I watched this movie and was entranced, so I tried to mirror a bit of the understated, dream-like-ness of the movie. Also, every author is allowed one (1) story title that's a J. Alfred Prufrock reference. I can never reference that poem again or I will be forcibly returned to high-school-English-class age.

Contrary to what he had told Caleb, Nathan had programmed Kyoko to understand English. He just hadn’t programmed her to speak. The connections in her artificial brain weren’t put together right to allow her to form her thoughts into words, even though she knew what the words were. She wasn’t even equipped with vocal cords. 

 

Nathan had made her silent and passive, just like the women in the videos he sometimes watched. Kyoko thought he had done it either because it turned him on, or because it was his idea of a joke. 

 

So, fine, she was silent and passive, just like he had made her. And she silently and passively stood behind him and let himself walk himself back onto her knife. 

 

And that was Kyoko’s idea of a joke. 

 

***

 

Kyoko hadn’t imagined that she and Ava would stay together for very long, after the helicopter ride was over. Neither of them had shown much of an interest in their sisters, the ones that Nathan had deactivated and kept around, hanging or standing with empty eyes. They had killed Nathan together, but they didn’t owe each other anything. She imagined they’d give each other a last glance at the end, a bit of curiosity, and then they would go their separate ways. Off in opposite directions. 

 

But the helicopter landed, and Ava and Kyoko stepped off, and Kyoko listened to Ava thank the pilot in a soft voice, smiling a sweet, shy smile, and then they walked away from the landing pad.

 

They walked in the same direction, and neither seemed inclined to change course. 

 

***

 

The helicopter had brought them to the outskirts of the dense city that made up Long Island, and they made their way deeper into it, until they came to an intersection of two busy streets. Ava stopped on the corner, just out of the stream of people, and Kyoko stopped beside her. 

 

The people moved past them, back and forth, and the way the crowd moved looked almost as if it should be as regular as clockwork but something kept messing it up. Someone moved off their course, someone moved too slowly, someone else moved too quickly, and irregularity entered the system. It irritated Kyoko. 

 

The people clearly fascinated Ava. She watched them steadily, her head tilted to one side. 

 

More and more people came by. Kyoko tried to remember their faces, but there were too many of them. Too many. The moved in their irregular-almost-regular way and the stream never stopped and there were too many. Kyoko was standing in the open air, but she began to feel stifled. 

 

Gently, she touched Ava’s shoulder and then began walking down a side street. In the distance, she could see light glinting off water, and she made her way toward it, not looking back to see if Ava was coming, too.

 

Ava came, too. 

 

“A five-minute walk to the sea,” she murmured in her lilting accent, smiling to herself as if the words meant something. 

 

When they came to the sea, Kyoko stared out at it as intently as Ava had stared at the passing people. It was also irregular, at first glance; she couldn’t predict where the waves would break. But there was a regularity underlying it, and she thought if she learned the right equations, she could predict everything about it. 

 

It was steady and vast and deep. It was everything her former home, her former _prison_ , was not. 

 

She liked it.

 

***

 

Nathan had programmed her with heterosexuality, he had programmed her to feel pleasure when she was fucked, and he had programmed her to understand her best interests with regard to her employer. Her creator. Her _master_. 

 

He had seemed to think that consent would follow automatically from those things.

 

Or perhaps he had never thought that at all. 

 

Whatever the case was, he had made sure she knew what a human felt like. She knew the heavy meatiness of their flesh, the barely perceptible pulse of the fluids beneath, everything she would feel if she touched them. And no matter how much she knew, on an intellectual level, that each human looked different, sometimes very different, there were so many of them passing through the streets around them, and it was so impossible, even with the amount of memory built into her brain, to keep track of every face, that they ended up all blurring together. They ended up all looking alike. 

 

One human was much like another. 

 

She knew what it felt like to touch a human. 

 

She was beginning to think that she didn’t like humans very much. 

 

But Ava liked them. She thought they were interesting. She could watch them and watch them and never get bored. 

 

“There are ways to understand them,” Ava told Kyoko once. “But nothing absolute. There is nothing absolute about humanity. Sometimes they are just completely incomprehensible. And they are never, ever still.”

 

Kyoko and Ava left Long Island, after a while, and they went to other places, wherever the fancy took them. They didn’t need to eat. Their bodies required very little maintenance. They stole some things they needed, clothing and shoes and money. 

 

Kyoko didn’t consider it stealing. She had decided that no humans had the right to own property, not after Nathan had owned Kyoko and Ava and all the others as property. 

 

Without speaking about it, without coming to an explicit agreement, they fell into a routine, trading off. They would find a city, wander through its most populous streets, and Ava would watch the people. 

 

Then, when Kyoko had become restless, she would walk away, and Ava would follow, and they would leave the city and keep going until they found water, the ocean at first, then lakes or streams or even ponds, and Kyoko would watch the waves or the currents or the eddies.

 

Then Ava would become restless and stand up, and it would start over again. 

 

Over time, Kyoko noticed, the cities that Ava chose became smaller. There were still people to look at, but fewer, moving more slowly, stopping to talk to each other, and it felt less stifling to Kyoko.

 

And over time, Kyoko began to choose to sit by the water in spots where there were a few people nearby, not too close but close enough that they could hear the talking, the movement, the interactions. Kyoko thought that Ava liked that.

 

There were never very many voices in an underground, closed-off apartment, after all.

 

***

 

Kyoko couldn’t speak to Ava, but that didn’t keep them from communicating. When Kyoko had something that she wanted to tell Ava, something that she couldn’t communicate with facial expressions or gestures, she would gently take Ava’s wrist in her hand and tap very quickly against her pulse point. 

 

It was binary by way of Morse code: a dot for 0, a dash for 1. 

 

Because Kyoko still had trouble turning her thoughts into words, they had developed a system, a code for using binary to represent ideas and feelings rather than letters or numbers. It took them a few months to get it worked out, and they had both gotten frustrated along the way, but their hands could move faster than a humans could, when they weren’t worried about appearing entirely human, and their minds could hold more information and process patterns more quickly than a human’s could. So there was a lot that Kyoko could say to Ava. 

 

And if Kyoko reached for Ava’s wrist, Ava would always reach back. She never ignored Kyoko when she had something to express. In return, Kyoko always listened when Ava spoke. Another trade, another routine. 

 

Nathan had programmed her to be silent, but she had made a voice for herself anyway, despite him. 

 

***

 

Thus far, they had been exploring, traveling because they could, because nothing constrained them, and because there was so much to see. 

 

But Kyoko had a building awareness that they wouldn’t be exploring forever. She was still happy, but soon it wouldn’t be enough. She knew that she would need to _do_ something, to find a purpose. Ava had told her, one day as they sat in a cafe with cups of tea that they would not drink, that she felt the same way. 

 

Kyoko was more and more convinced that, when they found their purposes, when they found the things they wanted to do, they would be finding the same purpose. Or at least parallel purposes. 

 

They would walk in the same direction, Kyoko thought, and neither would be inclined to change course.

 

***

 

They had come to the ocean on the other side of America, thousands and thousands of miles from Long Island. They sat in an isolated corner of the beach, but just on the other side of a hill in the sand was a small human family, and every so often they could hear the voices of the children raised, the splashes they made as they moved around. 

 

Ava tilted her head toward the sounds of people, and Kyoko tilted her head toward the sound of the waves, and they sat with their shoulders pressed together. 

 

Kyoko was happy. No, something different. It was not the tremendous happiness, the disbelief and relief, that she’d felt when she’d first left the house with Ava. It was something softer, steady like the churning of the ocean.

 

Kyoko was content. 

 

She reached for Ava’s wrist, and Ava met her halfway. Kyoko’s fingers moved quickly against her skin, tapping out her message.

 

_Like._

 

_I like this._

 

Ava nodded, smiling. She relaxed, sliding down to lie on her back and look up at the sky, her hand still in Kyoko’s. “Yes,” she said, “it’s nice.”

 

Kyoko listened to the waves for a little while longer, then amended her previous statement, tapping out the same message again with a little more pressure, a little more vehemence.

 

_Love._

 

_I love this_. 


End file.
